No fourth Fatima secret

Published: 14 May 2007

Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has denied that
the Church is suppressing an apocalyptic vision of the end of the world
some claim the Virgin Mary to have revealed at Fatima 90 years ago.

The
three Secrets of Fatima were written down by one of the children, Lucia
Dos Santos - who became a Carmelite nun - and sent to the Vatican in a
sealed envelope.

Two of the secrets predicting 20th-century
world war, totalitarianism and the eventual reconversion of communist
Russia to Christianity were made public.

Pope John Paul II
suggested that the third secret predicted the 1981 attempt on his life.
But he failed to satisfy conspiracy theorists, with many accusing the
Vatican of disclosing only part of the last Fatima secret.

Antonio
Socci, a Catholic journalist and author of "The Fourth Secret of
Fatima", said he had at first accepted John Paul's explanation. But his
researches led him to believe that the late pontiff's revelation had
been "partial".

He said the undisclosed portion of the secret
predicted a crisis of faith in the West and the collapse of the church
hierarchy in the face of a tidal wave of "apostasy and heresy".

But
Cardinal Bertone insisted the idea that the secret predicted
"catastrophic world events" or the collapse of the Christian church was
"pure fantasy".

In his book "The Last Fatima Visionary: My
Meetings with Sister Lucia", Cardinal Bertone says that before her
death in 2005, at the age of 97, the nun confirmed John Paul's account
of the "third secret".

"There is no fourth secret," he declared
yesterday. "Everything has been published and correctly interpreted."
He hinted that "anti-Christians" were behind the conspiracy theories.

In
a preface to Cardinal Bertone's book, Pope Benedict XVI writes that
publication of the "third secret" by his predecessor "unveiled the
truth amid the confused framework of apocalyptic interpretations and
speculation in the church".